{"id":2666,"date":"2018-10-24T09:35:54","date_gmt":"2018-10-24T09:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simplyhealth.today\/?p=2666"},"modified":"2021-03-19T21:17:20","modified_gmt":"2021-03-19T21:17:20","slug":"10-strategies-for-social-anxiety-disorder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/simplyhealth.today\/10-strategies-for-social-anxiety-disorder\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Strategies for Social Anxiety Disorder"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Social anxiety disorder was found to affect over 10 million Americans, but the Health day News. It is one of the mental disorders that causes people to stop living an emotionally healthy life. Due to this, many therapists have been trying to find ways to improve those suffering from this ailment. With more mental health awareness comes the need for people to take more control over their life situations. Aaron Beck, a psychotherapist who, observing his patients, developed a method of treatment to effectively deal with psychological problems.<\/p>\n

Beck observed the profound interdependence between thoughts, emotions and behavior. That is, how the thoughts (or cognitions) are related to a specific event, impacts decisively on the emotions experienced, and influencing at the same time the reaction of the subject to that event. When people gradually change the patterns of thought, they reduce the grip negative emotions of social anxiety disorder and soon behavioral changes can happen.<\/p>\n

1. Examine the Thoughts<\/h3>\n

By examining your thoughts, you can apply logic to many of your mental processes. For example, think of an employee who is afraid of losing his job. From morning to night he begins to obsess over the fact that his supervisors, his bosses or the management team claim that he does everything wrong or that his work lacks quality. Entering this circle of thoughts can provoke a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, by reason of thinking that he does anything wrong, sooner or later it will end up doing it really badly, because he has fallen into a very negative state of mind.<\/p>\n

This is how the track of inadequacy begins and the roots of social anxiety start taking hold in the brain<\/a>. So it\u2019s best to examine the thoughts, question why you are thinking the way do? Has something actually happened to make you think this way or are you letting your mind place non-existent barrier in your way?<\/p>\n

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2. Programming of Positive Activities<\/h3>\n

Another of the most useful strategy is to plan rewarding activities during the day. Most often people tend to feel undeserving and so punish themselves from experiencing the full potential of a happy life free of social anxiety. The fear of being judged can be very crippling. This strategy forces you to to consider yourself first, above everyone and everything else. You can do things that you truly enjoy, and not those that make you zone out of the reality of life.<\/p>\n

It is through giving yourself quality time that you can achieve any remedial effect from the sadness that comes with this disorder<\/a>. The goal is to interrupt the repetitive activity that is taking place, at work, at home, or during any daily activity. In this way you try to remove “space” from the “negative self” that is inserted during these moments and unleashes a ruminating cycle of negative thoughts that obsess and generate stress.<\/p>\n

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3. Hierarchy of Concerns<\/h3>\n

Intrusive thoughts are like the smoke of a fireplace, like a fire that burns within us. This internal bonfire is made up of our problems, the same to which we find a solution and which, day by day, cause us greater malaise<\/a>. A first step in taming this fire of thoughts, feelings and anxieties is to clarify. And how can you do this? By creating a hierarchy of problems, a scale of concerns ranging from the smallest to the largest.<\/p>\n

You will then have to start writing down these concerns, also known as visualization of the real face of the perceived or actual concerns, chaos that you have inside in the form of a flurry of ideas. Following this, you can then create a hierarchy starting from what you consider a small problem, up to the most paralyzing problem that apparently overwhelms you. This is not the time to actually deeply ponder, you are just taking the thoughts out of your brain and putting them into paper, and allocating them a spot of relevance.<\/p>\n

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4. Emotional Reasoning<\/h3>\n

Emotional<\/a> reasoning is a very frequent distortion. For example, if today was a bad day and you feel frustrated, you will soon come to the conclusion that life is a tunnel without exit, that living does not make any sense and from there to thinking about suicide, the road can be short. Another common idea is to think that, if someone disappoints you, betrays or abandons you, perhaps it is because your value as a lover is little, or that you are unattractive and you do not deserve to be loved.<\/p>\n

A useful behavioral cognitive technique, you need to learn to develop in your daily life, is about not forgetting that your immediate emotions are not always indicative of an objective truth, they are only momentary moods to be understood and managed until they go away, spontaneously, as they arrived. As Aaron Beck said: “If our thinking is mired with distorted symbolic meanings, illogical reasoning and erroneous interpretations, we end up becoming really blind and deaf”.<\/p>\n

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5. Prevention of Intrusive Thoughts<\/h3>\n

Whether you like it or not, there are always situations that makes you fall back into the abyss of intrusive thoughts. One way to pay attention to these circumstances is a personal diary.
\nWriting down your feeling daily, especially the thoughts that travel through your mind and feelings during certain situations can be very helpful. This is one way of giving a voice to the internal noise within that cause the feelings of inadequacy and loneliness.<\/p>\n

You will then have time to access whether or not the things you were thinking are true, but most often it is about reflecting on your reactions to certain situations. Understand why you need to please everyone, especially since this concept has been proven to be part of human impossibility, no matter how charming or rich an individual is. By touching your internal wounds<\/a> you are provoking the need to change and heal them. As you take note of all this, you will realize it and you will be able to prevent (and even manage) these processes.<\/p>\n

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6. The ABC Technique<\/h3>\n

The logical structure connected to the ABC technique can be imagined as a three-phase scheme:<\/p>\n

A – Activating event: Identifies the antecedent conditions, the stimuli, the events, the situations.<\/p>\n

B – Belief system: Indicates the thought, the reasoning, the mental activities that form the cognitive base of the individual.<\/p>\n

C – Consequences: Defines the consequences of these mental activities and identifies emotional and behavioral reactions.<\/p>\n

This technique is useful to help the person become aware of how their emotional episodes develop, starting from an event. The person voluntarily submits to the problematic situation, to the A stimulus. Some types of phobias<\/a> lend themselves particularly well to this type of exercises. They are those in which exposure to situation A is easily reproducible. However it is not always this way. The more sophisticated the social situation, the more difficult it is to recreate it in an artificial exercise. This is an ideal tool to use when in a counselling session or as a personal form of developing a stronger sense of self.<\/p>\n

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7. Self-Education<\/h3>\n

Self-instruction is a highly directive technique, and requires a high rhetorical and persuasive capacity in the person. It is a strategy often used in therapy, but can also be self-administered. Your will to come out of the darkness created by the social anxiety disorder is paramount. Each of us has the natural ability to give orders within, directives, instructions, or other information necessary to solve the various problems that arise. At this point it is a matter of convincing yourself to give alternative self-instructions to your automatic dysfunctional thoughts.<\/p>\n

Simply put, when an intrusive thought in a social situation arises, you can imagine your emotional<\/a> responding self to be like a naughty child. So when you feel anxious, you internally imagine the parent personality saying, \u2018stop it!\u2019 and then reassure yourself by reinforcing positive questioning like isn\u2019t it nice to be out with friends etc. It will not be easy to convince him of the effectiveness of this operation, that at first sight can be evaluated as weird.<\/p>\n

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8. Role Playing Therapy<\/h3>\n

Role-playing, is a tool widely used in contexts that can vary from individual psychotherapy<\/a>, to couple therapy, to group setting intervention, to psychosocial training. The goal of role playing in psychodrama is to bring out states of mind and bring them to life through the recitation of attitudes or behavior. The scene generally takes place in front of observers and at the end of it a comment is made of what everyone has tried and observed in others.<\/p>\n

Although these are situations in which, unlike in real life, there are one or more people watching, obviously altering the setting, already in itself “simulated”, however the advantage is precisely the possibility of facing, in simulation, a realistic situation, potentially anxiety-free, with the consequent flexibility and tranquility determined by a protected context.<\/p>\n

In a safe environment you can experiment with this, by using your camera to record yourself within a certain situation and imagine yourself being part of the panel giving advice as to how to reinforce positivity.<\/p>\n

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9. Gradual Exposure<\/h3>\n

The gradual exposure is a technique that consists in programming the modification of a dysfunctional behavior by taking a small step at a time. The aim is for you to break down the problematic behavior into sub-objectives of minor difficulty and to expose yourself to them, that is, to face them, gradually, from the easiest to the most difficult, in order to get to complete the whole action without more problems.<\/p>\n

Let’s take an example of a person with a panic disorder<\/a> who, having learned the techniques of anxiety management, has the therapeutic goal of taking the subway to go to work. The person will need to break this goal down into smaller, more easily reachable steps and achieve them gradually. Initially, the person will go to the subway platform and immerse themselves into the atmosphere by just standing there.<\/p>\n

The will be there watching the trains come and go and observe the passengers. Thereafter the person will take the subway only for one stop, trying to avoid rush hour. Subsequently, the number of stops will be increased each time until the full journey will be completed.\"\"<\/p>\n

10. Flooding<\/h3>\n

This is one of the so-called “strong” techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy. The therapist brings the patient to experience, on an imaginative or real level, the situation that most frightens them and for the longest possible time, in order to make them feel the unfounded reality of their fears so to speak. In general, anxiety after reaching a peak, it resizes or in some cases disappears completely.<\/p>\n

By putting yourself in the extreme thought process of your social anxiety, you are able to see just how unfounded some of your misconceptions and thus reactions are. However, this does not mean you now have to start a cycle of a self-blame for \u2018being stupid\u2019. It simply means you take on a viewing glass and objective view of that sometimes the thoughts in your head do not correlate with the reality that is happening before you.<\/p>\n

Naturally this method is best applied in the safety and guidance of a professionally trained therapist<\/a> that will be able to make you safely deal with your fears and anxieties.<\/p>\n\r\n

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